Collapsed Drain Repair Fleet | One Job, No Digging

The call came in on a Tuesday morning. A homeowner on the Edenbrook estate had noticed the downstairs toilet flushing sluggishly for a couple of weeks. Then the manhole in the back garden started holding water. By the time they rang us, it was backing up every time the washing machine emptied.

Sluggish flush, standing water in the manhole, smell starting to come through. Classic signs. We told them we'd be there same day.

What We Found at the Manhole

The engineer lifted the manhole cover and ran a CCTV camera through the line towards the boundary. About nine metres in, the footage told the story clearly. A section of old clay pipe, probably laid in the late 1970s when the area was first developed, had partially collapsed. Not a crack, not a root intrusion, an actual structural failure. The pipe wall had buckled inward on one side, reducing the bore by roughly sixty per cent.

Clay pipe at that age isn't unusual around GU51. It does a decent job for decades, then the ground shifts, a root system from a nearby tree puts lateral pressure on a joint, or it simply reaches the end of its working life. This one had done all three.

The blockage wasn't a fatberg or a wet wipe accumulation. It was the pipe itself.

The Options, Laid Out Honestly

We gave the homeowner two options on the spot.

The pipe run was accessible from both ends. The collapse was a single section, not the whole line. Relining was the right call.

The homeowner had a decent lawn and a raised planting bed directly above the affected section. Digging would have meant losing both, plus the cost of making good afterwards. The resin liner would give them a structurally sound pipe inside the old clay shell, without touching the surface.

What We Did

First, high-pressure water jetting to clear the partial blockage and clean the pipe walls back to bare material. You can't line a dirty pipe and expect the resin to bond properly.

Then the liner itself, a felt tube saturated with epoxy resin, was fed through from the upstream access point. It was inflated to press tight against the existing pipe wall, including the collapsed section, reshaping it from the inside. The resin was then cured. Once set, the liner becomes the new pipe. Smooth bore, no joints for roots to find, chemically resistant.

Final CCTV pass to confirm the bore was clear and the liner had seated correctly. It had.

Start to finish: around four hours on site. The garden was untouched. The manhole was flowing freely. The homeowner watched the whole CCTV survey on the monitor, which most people find genuinely interesting once they get over the initial surprise of seeing what's under their garden.

The Lesson Worth Taking

If you're on Edenbrook, Elvetham Heath, or anywhere in GU51 or GU52 with a house built before the mid-1980s, clay pipe is likely still in the ground somewhere on your run. It doesn't need to be managed anxiously, but if you're getting slow drainage that doesn't respond to jetting, or you're seeing water sitting in a manhole rather than flowing through, a CCTV survey will tell you exactly what you're dealing with. Sixty minutes with a camera is considerably cheaper than waiting until a collapse becomes an emergency.

This particular job was caught at the right moment. The collapse was significant but the pipe hadn't failed completely. Another month and the void around the buckled section would have started drawing in surrounding soil, and then the options get more complicated.

Drainsco covers Fleet and the wider GU postcodes, with engineers available 24 hours a day. No call-out fee, and you'll have a clear price before any work starts. If you think you might have something similar going on, give us a call and we'll tell you straight what we think you're looking at.